An Interview with Liz Milliron by Annette Dashofy

Pennsylvania State Trooper Jim Duncan responds to a call regarding a missing autistic young man. When the

boy is quickly found, Jim thinks the case is closed…until the young man insists the police need to help a “sleeping blue lady” and leads them to a dead woman in an abandoned shack, clad in only her underwear.

Meanwhile, defense attorney Sally Castle is searching for a troubled young woman who wandered into her office wanting protection from an unnamed man…and disappeared before Sally could obtain any details. Sally is bothered by the incident and unnerved when she discovers that Jim’s dead body and her missing potential client are the same person.

Jim and Sally soon discover the young woman led a secret double life, with ties to the autistic boy who started it all. As Jim and Sally investigate, the case takes increasingly ominous turns, uncovering hidden money and a seamy underbelly of sex work, before turning into a desperate race to stop a killer. Can Jim and Sally solve the case in time to stop the murder of an innocent boy?

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Thicker Than Water (September 19, 2023, Level Best Books) is the sixth in Liz Milliron’s Laurel Highland Mysteries featuring Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Jim Duncan and Defense Attorney Sally Castle. The entire series is tightly written yet lush in setting and character development, but Liz has upped her game with this one. Please welcome Liz back to Writers Who Kill.

Thicker Than Water opens with Sally Castle and her law partner, Tanelsa Parson, moving into a new office. When the series began five books ago, Sally worked in the Public Defenders Office. Catch us up a little. What brought Sally into the private sector of law practice?

Sally was frustrated with her job at the public defender. She loved the fact that she was helping people who needed it. But it’s actually hard to qualify for a court-appointed defender. The government’s idea of “unable to afford an attorney” is very different from a regular person’s. She felt too many people were turned away because they didn’t qualify, even though they might have been hard-pressed to pay a private attorney. Also, when you work for the government, you don’t get to pick your clients. You defend who you’re told to. Sally wanted to take the clients who needed her the most, at least the ones she believed did. So, she started her own firm and asked Tanelsa, who she worked with at the public defender’s office, to join her.

Pennsylvania State Trooper Jim Duncan has also moved into a new career path as an investigator. Is this move a promotion? Why is he still called a Trooper instead of a Detective?

No. Working for the Criminal Investigation Section, the Pennsylvania State Police’s investigators, is a job description, not a rank. This is a lateral move for him, just as if he’d moved to working with the K-9 division or Emergency Response. The PSP doesn’t have the title of “detective.” Even with CIS, ranks are trooper, corporal, etc.

Jim’s partner questions why they’re responding to a missing person’s case when it’s not a “crime scene.” Don’t police routinely investigate missing persons?

They do, but usually not under these kind of situations. Noah is nineteen and he’s only been “missing” for a couple of hours at most. Yes, he’s an at-risk individual because of his autism, but Trooper Cavendish’s position is that search and rescue is more suited for the circumstances. Now, if Noah had been missing for a longer time, had SAR not found anything, or if there was a witness who’d seen him get into a strange car, Cavendish would feel differently. To her, there just isn’t enough evidence for an investigation – yet.

Noah insists he has seen a “sleeping blue lady.” The obvious assumption is that he has seen a dead woman, but he’s clearly an unreliable witness. How do Jim and his partner deal with this young man?

Jim and Cavendish don’t want to completely dismiss him. They know that just because he is autistic doesn’t mean he has no awareness of his surroundings or can’t tell the truth. At the same time, they know they can’t launch a full-scale investigation on only his word. They try to compromise by having Cavendish stay to question Noah and his mother, while Jim and Aislyn McAllister take a look around the area where Noah had been earlier. Of course, they do find the “sleeping blue lady” and, well, she’s not sleeping.

Throughout this book there’s a recurring theme of “to have kids or not to have kids.” Why is Sally so reluctant to consider starting a family?

It isn’t just reluctance. Sally flat-out doesn’t want to have kids. Not that she doesn’t like kids, she has simply never wanted to be a parent. But deep down, Sally knows Jim does want a family, or at least that’s what he’s said in the past, so she’s a little afraid that if she says what she really feels, he’ll leave her.

Why is Sally so hesitant to have Thanksgiving dinner with Jim’s parents?

Sally’s mother, Louise, is very strident when it comes to the fact that Sally’s brother and sister have families and Sally doesn’t. Her mother never fails to remind her that she’s in her mid-thirties, her biological clock is ticking, that Louise would really like to see her youngest child married and a mother. It’s a very tiring conversation. Sally wants to meet Jim’s parents, but she doesn’t see how to avoid the same conversation with them. Basically, she’s tired of justifying her choices to people.

Maddie shows up at Sally’s office but runs away before Sally can find out why this young woman is so scared. Does she run away because of the secret life she’s leading?

Sort of. Maddie has worked very hard to keep what she’s doing secret, so yeah, the idea of telling a lawyer kind of freaks her out. But there is also the fact that although Maddie desperately wants help, she doesn’t believe anyone can really do that. That’s why she leaves before telling Sally her story.

Why does Jim allow Sally to tag along when he visits Maddie’s college?

Part of it is because Jim knows Sally has a little bit of guilt over Maddie leaving. She feels she could have done more to help the young woman. The other reason is Jim knows that if he doesn’t take Sally with him, she’ll go on her own. At least this way he can keep an eye on her.

Time is money, and with Sally and Tanelsa starting a fledgling law firm, Sally seems to be spending a lot of time working on a case with no paying client. Why? And how does Tanelsa feel about it?

As I said before, Sally feels guilty about not doing more for Maddie. She’s trying to make up for it. Tanelsa is sympathetic, but at the same time she knows they need paying clients to keep the lights on. She knows Sally, though, and she knows what she got into when she joined the firm. She’s willing to put up with it – for a while. After Tanelsa learns what was going on in Maddie’s life, she becomes more invested in finding out what happened.

There are a lot of story threads going on involving parents and children. Maddie’s parents are clueless, Noah’s is overprotective. Then there’s Sally’s mother and Jim’s parents. And the big debate between Tanelsa and Lisa and Sally and Jim about becoming parents. Is this an intentional theme as you started writing the book or did it develop later in the writing process?

Theme is usually “accidental” for me, something that develops as I write. But this time, it was very intentional. At the end of Lie Down with Dogs, Jim asks Sally to move in with him and she says “not yet.” Their relationship is moving to a deeper level. Part of a long-term relationship is exploring the idea of “family” and what it means to each person. I wanted to look at that concept from a variety of perspectives.

What’s next for Jim and Sally? And for you?

I’m currently working on the seventh Laurel Highlands Mystery and I’m toying with the title Saving the Guilty. In that one, Sally and Tanelsa are asked to work on an appeal for a man convicted of killing his wife. Simultaneously, Jim and Cavendish are working the murder of a man who is living under a fake identity. It’s a story with a lot of intersections and it all has to happen in five days, so wish me luck.

As for me, the fifth book in my Homefront Mysteries series, The Secrets We Keep, is scheduled for release in February 2024. Betty is hired by a soldier who is home on medical furlough to find his birth mother. But when the woman she thinks may be the one she’s looking for is murdered, she ends up working to clear her client of the crime. I also just signed a contract for one of my short stories, called “Mal de Ojo,” to be published in the Mystery Most International anthology, which will be out in 2024. And I have one other thing in the works, but I don’t think I’m supposed to make it public yet.

Thanks for the great questions and for hosting me!

Thank YOU, Liz.

For more on Liz and her books, check out her website and sign up for her newsletter.

https://lizmilliron.com/

Liz’s Bio:

Liz Milliron has been making up stories, and creating her own endings for other people’s stories, for as long as she can remember. She’s worked for twenty years in the corporate world, but finds making things up is far more satisfying than writing software manuals. A lifelong mystery fan, she is the author of The Laurel Highlands Mysteries and The Home Front Mysteries, both from Level Best Books. Her short fiction has appeared at Uppagus and Mysterical-e. and been in Lucky Charms: 12 Crime Tales, the Anthony award-winning Blood on the Bayou (the 2016 Bouchercon anthology), Fish Out of Water, Malice Domestic 12 – Mystery Most Historical and The Killer Wore Cranberry: A Fifth Course of Chaos.

Liz lives near Pittsburgh with her husband and a very spoiled retired-racer greyhound named Koda. She is a past-president of the Pittsburgh chapter of Sisters in Crime, and the current vice-president, and a member of Pennwriters. Find her on Facebook at https://facebook.com/LizMilliron, or follow her on Instagram (@LizMilliron).